Steve’s Practice Drill #5

In my previous post, I referred to Jeff Atwood’s post about The Ultimate Code Kata.  Jeff goes through a couple other developers’ thoughts on good programming practice techniques–  one of these is Steve Yegge’s entry of practicing programming, which lays out twelve different practice drills a programmer can use to improve themselves.  Since it seems like it will be particularly helpful in my day-to-day work, I’ve decided to start out with Drill #5:

Practice Drill #5:   Make a list of your 10 favorite programming tools: the ones you feel you use the most, the ones you almost couldn’t live without. Spend an hour reading the docs for one of the tools in your list, chosen at random. In that hour, try learn some new feature of the tool that you weren’t aware of, or figure out some new way to use the tool.

For this post, I’d like to document the 10 tools I can’t live without.  I’ll return with what I’ve learned about the tool I pick in my next post.  So, without further ado:

10 tools I can’t live without (in no particular order):

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• jEdit
• Mozilla Firefox
• Notepad2
• Bash
• ssh
• Cygwin/X
• Wireshark
• Eclipse
• TortoiseSVN

Since it’s such a powerful tool and there’s no doubt lots of stuff I haven’t yet discovered about it, I’ve chosen to start out with Visual Studio.  More coming in my next post!

Coding for Soup???

What’s this about?

Earlier today, I found Jeff Atwood’s post about practicing programming, “The Ultimate Code Kata“.  Here’s a bit about what Jeff means when he talks about “code kata”:

Effortful study means constantly tackling problems at the very edge of your ability. Stuff you may have a high probability of failing at. Unless you’re failing some of the time, you’re probably not growing professionally. You have to seek out those challenges and push yourself beyond your comfort limit.

Those challenges can sometimes be found on the job, but they don’t have to be. Separating the practicing from the profession is often referred to as code kata.

That’s what this blog is about.  Here, I want to document my attempts at focused programming practice.  This is intended primarily as a learning experience for me, but hopefully I’ll be able to write some things here that will help other people, too.

So, who am I?

I’m Jonathon, a student soon to be in my fourth and final year of my university’s computer engineering program.  I’ve still got plenty to learn, but I’m hoping that through this sort of focused practice, I’ll be able to improve myself as a programmer.

And…  coding for soup?

Coding for soup sort of describes my life situation at the moment (the summer of 2008).  Right now, I have a summer internship working for a university research group.  And living in the dorm + not much money or cooking skills = a lot of soup.  Plus, it sounded catchy.